GCHQ blocks 58,000 scam emails from government addresses every day
The UK's intelligence agency GCHQ has stepped up the fight against online scammers and created a tool that blocks malicious emails that appear to be sent from government addresses, but are in fact run by cyber criminals.
The blocking system can identify when "gov.uk" emails are being sent from IP addresses not associated with an official government computer and block them.
GCHQ has been testing the system on emails from the fake "taxrefund@gov.uk" address, which was sending 58,000 messages a day. "Whoever was sending 58,000 malicious emails per day from taxrefund@gov.uk isn't doing it anymore," said Ciaran Martin, the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, which is launching in October.
